ATTN art aficionados: David Wojnarowicz’s short film A Fire in My Belly (1986-7) is playing at U of C’s Smart Museum of Art through February 6th. The film (which, among other things, is a direct response by Wojnarowicz to the AIDS pandemic) was banned from the original exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery following protests from religious groups. The Smart is showing the film in consortium with a number of other museums around the country as a means of decrying censorship. Pictured above is the sumptuous catalog for the original exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture; Unabridged has it on hand for your perusal.
“The question is not ‘can they reason’ nor, ‘can they talk’ but rather, ‘can they suffer?’”
“As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.”
“I want to be a living work of art.”
The Marchesa Luisa Casati, an heiress and muse I wanted to be when I was fifteen years old:
Nude servants gilded in gold leaf attended her. Bizarre wax mannequins sat as guests at her dining table. She bejeweled herself in live snakes and was infamous for her Lalique flask of absinthe that accompanied her evening constitutionals around the grounds, parading her beloved cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes, swathed in furs and nothing else, dubbing her thereafter the “naked sorceress.”
